About this episode

Dr. Harriet Wolfe discusses how psychoanalysis can address toxic polarization through interdisciplinary dialogue and group experiences of historical trauma.

The current social, political and historical context offers many difficult challenges. We have experienced up close and from a distance awareness of a remarkable number of challenges including the wars, political unrest, growing socioeconomic inequities, climate catastrophe, and human and animal suffering. These times are also marked by polarized thinking, including among analysts, candidates and in our communities. An application of a psychoanalytically-informed method that rests on psychoanalytic clinical theory but focuses on group experiences of psycho-historical conflict as it continues in the present is offered as a means to facilitate deep and moving change when there is toxic polarization. In this episode, Dr. Harriet Wolfe presents a unique application of psychoanalytic thinking. She describes an interdisciplinary group that is international, intergenerational and diverse that meets periodically to apply analytic thinking to intractable large scale historical group traumas. This method, called the International Dialogue Initiative includes psychoanalysts but also others (e.g. economists, lawyers, diplomats, historians) who share stories and deeply listen with the purpose…

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